Named for political insider Thomas “Tom” Hughes (1859-1923). A Pennsylvania native, Hughes came to Los Angeles around 1885 as a carpenter. He would come to run a successful hardwood contracting business but made his real fortune drilling for oil in the 1900s. An oil millionaire tends to make powerful friends quickly, and Hughes soon became an influential voice in Republican politics. Although he proudly never took a salaried government job, that didn’t stop him from managing successful election campaigns for California governor William Stephens and Los Angeles mayor Frederic Woodman. (Woodman rewarded Hughes with a position – unpaid, of course – as harbor commissioner.) Hughes, whose 22 acre “Vista del Mar” estate was in the heart of Palms, championed L.A.’s 1915 annexation of the town; locals raised a stink when Palms’s former Valley Street was renamed Hughes Avenue as thanks. Perhaps Hughes’s greatest antagonist was his second wife Gertrude Ozmun, who in 1919 claimed that he reneged on a $500,000 prenup. They reconciled a year before his death. Postscript: Vista del Mar is now a school and center for special needs kids.
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